Today we’re thrilled to announce a new $15 million fund to support Intuit developers and the QuickBooks platform. Working with Intuit, we launched the Lighter Capital Intuit Developer Fund for companies building apps on the QuickBooks platform, including QuickBooks Online, with its 2.38 million subscribers.
At Lighter Capital, we see strong potential in the Intuit developer ecosystem, and we want to help companies developing QuickBooks apps for small and medium-sized businesses get to get to the next level.
“As more SMBs turn to the cloud for core business functions and services, we believe we’ll see increasing demand for developer apps to serve the QuickBooks Online community,” our CEO BJ Lackland told ProgrammableWeb.
As ProgrammableWeb notes, millions of QuickBooks Online subscribers rely on one or more of the 500+ third-party add-on applications found in Intuit’s application showcase to run their businesses. By supporting QuickBooks developers as they scale, we hope to stimulate the development of even more apps designed to work with the QuickBooks platform and APIs.
We’ve worked closely with the Intuit Developer Group to put the new fund together. “We’re thrilled Lighter Capital is committed to providing our developers access to capital that can help them scale their apps and better serve the millions of small businesses that use QuickBooks Online with apps to help them streamline their workflow,” said Alex Barnett, director of the group.
Lighter Capital client and Intuit developer partner Agiliron spoke about why they chose revenue-based financing to scale. “We created a product, and once that offering reached maturity, we needed more money to scale quickly,” said Satish Menon, co-founder, and CEO of Agiliron. “In the SaaS world, things move very quickly, so the speed of funding was critical for us. With Lighter Capital, we went from initial consultation to funding in less than a month.” Agiliron provides an all-in-one software suite that allows companies to manage all orders, inventory and CRM records, from all channels, in one place. They used funding from Lighter Capital to hire staff and expand their marketing efforts.
You can learn more about our revenue-based financing model and the new fund here. Our team will be at QuickBooks Connect this week, and you can learn more about the fund at a discussion called “Paving your app’s financial future: How to get the money to grow” on Thurs. Nov 16 in room 212. BJ will also be a judge at the App Showdown. We hope to see you there!